two prot questions about haste.

Hey folks I've recently begun regearing my paladin whos been relaxing since Pandaria hit. Everywhere I look (Elitist jerks, noxxic, here, etc) I see people basically saying go haste, or go mastery, or more commonly "Go haste" My question is can anyone give a reason for this? I've been looking but its mostly "Haste is the best stat go for it with out a whole lot of reasoning behind it.

Attached to that I heard going haste over mastery is "tougher to play" according to ask Mr Robot, how so? What is it that causes it to be harder and is their anything I need to be aware of?

I guess there is one more. Is their a limit/breakpoint/number you are aiming for or is it just more = better?

Thank you and sorry if these are newbish but the pally community has always been accommodating to those willing to learn.

Well the reasoning is that haste reduces cooldown on your Crusader Strike and Judgment. Which means more Holy Power. Which means more Shield of the Righteous and that means a whole lot less damage taken. Now of course you need to use the reduced cooldown to the maximum... sloppy gcd management won't get you far with haste stacking.

First thing you need to realise, is that most guides and completely wrong and outdated. Some of them are almost embarrasing.

AskMrRobot considers the haste build to be 'tougher' to play because your spells come of CDs faster so you have to use more spells in the same time period as you would without haste. A haste build however have more leniancy with your SotR usage and more frequent SS ticks + more self healin, which for makes me considering it even easier than a mastery build, since a mastery build for sure have a much higher "skill cap" and a much more fragile gamestyle as the timing och each SotR is far more important.

There is not real limit with anything in tanking. Nobody can give the answers to your tanking.

Some likes to go for stamina
Some likes to go for expertise hard cap
Some likes to go for expertise soft cap
Some likes to go max haste
Some likes to go max mastery
Some likes to go a mix in between haste and mastery

There is no one answer, you have to figure out yourself what you feel most comfortable with.

Mastery is arguably a stronger defensive stat than haste. But the reason that haste has become the god of all gods stat, is because it also provides a decent chunk of dps increase, mastery does not. To basic logic is: If I can survive and do 70k dps, or if I can survive and do 90k dps, the latter is better.
Haste is just a well rounded stat providing decent defensive and offensive benefits.

In the end, nobody should tell you how to gear. You should learn how each stat work, how they change your gameplay and out of that make your own choice. That is how you become the best tank you can be, by actually understanding what and why you are doing. In current content normal modes you could gem spirit and by fine basically.

Volun-told - A supposedly optional event, award, assignment, or activity in which a person (or persons) are required to attend either by persons-in-charge nominating them or their peers expecting them to be there. The individual often has no say in the matter, and non-attendance in frowned upon.I am so tired of seeing terrible people, being admired, for being terrible people.

the 2 best way right now are:Standard Duty Tanking: Control/Haste (cap Hit and Exp, dump everything else into Haste, add Stam as needed)AoE or Maximum survival Tanking: Pure Avoidance (don't bother with Hit and Exp, throw everything into Avoidance. If you have to add another stat, go with Mastery or Hit)
for some fight you might want pure matery (Heroic Sha Tanking, life threatening hit every 8-10 seconds)

the 2 best way right now are:Standard Duty Tanking: Control/Haste (cap Hit and Exp, dump everything else into Haste, add Stam as needed)AoE or Maximum survival Tanking: Pure Avoidance (don't bother with Hit and Exp, throw everything into Avoidance. If you have to add another stat, go with Mastery or Hit)
for some fight you might want pure matery (Heroic Sha Tanking, life threatening hit every 8-10 seconds)

those info mostly come from elitist jerk

Just a tip. If someone calls avoidance gearing for "survival tanking", that person most likely has no idea how tanking works and that guide/person should be taken with a gigantic grain of salt.

This also goes to the OP aswell. A lot of the current guides + "This is the right talent/gear/glyph" mumbojumbo should be taken with a huge grain of salt. Consider your options yourself and do not become a sheep in the herd

There are more than 1 correct ways to approach paladin tanking.

Last edited by Firefly33; 2013-04-01 at 04:25 PM.

Volun-told - A supposedly optional event, award, assignment, or activity in which a person (or persons) are required to attend either by persons-in-charge nominating them or their peers expecting them to be there. The individual often has no say in the matter, and non-attendance in frowned upon.I am so tired of seeing terrible people, being admired, for being terrible people.

the 2 best way right now are:Standard Duty Tanking: Control/Haste (cap Hit and Exp, dump everything else into Haste, add Stam as needed)AoE or Maximum survival Tanking: Pure Avoidance (don't bother with Hit and Exp, throw everything into Avoidance. If you have to add another stat, go with Mastery or Hit)
for some fight you might want pure matery (Heroic Sha Tanking, life threatening hit every 8-10 seconds)

those info mostly come from elitist jerk

Where does it say to not bother with hit/expertise when you are gearing for avoidance?

Every gearing strat I've come across has recommended at least capping hit and going for soft cap in expertise. We are in active mitigation now and there are several bosses in ToT that require smart use of SotR and you are going to want that reliability in gaining stacks for using SotR. Again as Firefly mentioned anything you read should obviously be taken with a grain of salt.

Where does it say to not bother with hit/expertise when you are gearing for avoidance?

Every gearing strat I've come across has recommended at least capping hit and going for soft cap in expertise. We are in active mitigation now and there are several bosses in ToT that require smart use of SotR and you are going to want that reliability in gaining stacks for using SotR. Again as Firefly mentioned anything you read should obviously be taken with a grain of salt.

If your goal is pure avoidance (which, realistically, is only beneficial if you're tanking a large number of adds and threat is of minor importance), then you can ignore hit/expertise...with pure avoidance and 4-5+ mobs, you should be getting frequent enough GC procs to maintain your Holy Power and SotR without any issue -- since GC will provide HP even if AS doesn't hit, and SotR will provide the damage reduction on cast rather than hitting. But, again, that requires a sufficient amount of adds and negligible need for threat for it to be practical.

Pure avoidance is terrible as it is extremely spiky. If you're uncomfortable with control haste go the mastery route for more block, and go for hit/exp cap once you feel comfortable playing with knowing when to SoTR whether your at 3, 4 or 5 HP, instead of just spamming it whenever you get enough HP.

As far as I know, most of the theory crafting for Prot Paladins is coming from that one website. Check it out and it will show why haste or mastery is being recommended. Lost of math there as well and it is kept up to date. Theck is also the one feeding the stat weights to AskMrRobot.

As far as I know, most of the theory crafting for Prot Paladins is coming from that one website. Check it out and it will show why haste or mastery is being recommended. Lost of math there as well and it is kept up to date. Theck is also the one feeding the stat weights to AskMrRobot.

By the way, just read the Elitist Jerks paladin thread. Oh my god. That one needs some serious clean up and work.

Volun-told - A supposedly optional event, award, assignment, or activity in which a person (or persons) are required to attend either by persons-in-charge nominating them or their peers expecting them to be there. The individual often has no say in the matter, and non-attendance in frowned upon.I am so tired of seeing terrible people, being admired, for being terrible people.

By the way, just read the Elitist Jerks paladin thread. Oh my god. That one needs some serious clean up and work.

Lol you've just poo poo'd all current research available on protection paladin tanking, saying it should be taken with a HUUUUGE grain of salt (cause the authors, Theck included, have no idea wth they're talking about) and then say that the op could gem spirit and be perfectly fine in normal modes. Excellent example of garbage info the op should take with a grain of salt. Theck's blog however at least has extensive simulation testing, endless mathematical research, and well thought out theorycraft to assist a paladin tank at any level of raiding with the maximum knowledge to use at his disposal. Theck knows more about paladin tanking than the devs themselves do. Consider his latest findings on the power of haste and Sacred Shield ticks and it almost makes the devs look laughable for missing such an overpowered concept.

Lawl. Considerably more useful info on Sacred Duty than "all guides on pally tanking are horribly outdated. Don't listen to any of them. Don't be sheeple. Just know how stuff works for yourself. Gem spirit if you want. It won't affect anything." Lol. With a grain of salt indeed, sir

Lol you've just poo poo'd all current research available on protection paladin tanking, saying it should be taken with a HUUUUGE grain of salt (cause the authors, Theck included, have no idea wth they're talking about) and then say that the op could gem spirit and be perfectly fine in normal modes. Excellent example of garbage info the op should take with a grain of salt. Theck's blog however at least has extensive simulation testing, endless mathematical research, and well thought out theorycraft to assist a paladin tank at any level of raiding with the maximum knowledge to use at his disposal. Theck knows more about paladin tanking than the devs themselves do. Consider his latest findings on the power of haste and Sacred Shield ticks and it almost makes the devs look laughable for missing such an overpowered concept.

Lawl. Considerably more useful info on Sacred Duty than "all guides on pally tanking are horribly outdated. Don't listen to any of them. Don't be sheeple. Just know how stuff works for yourself. Gem spirit if you want. It won't affect anything." Lol. With a grain of salt indeed, sir

Reading comprehension is hard...

His point was that for normal modes you can do w/e and you'll still be able to clear it.
However there are better and worse ways, at the same time, all of them depend too much on a fight and group comp / strat. While there are some generally better strats for generally better survivability it's not always true. (ie sha, as long as you can get 3 HoP for the next thrash, unless you can get enough haste to get another 3 for an extra shield you would be better off getting more mastery and etc)

By the way, just read the Elitist Jerks paladin thread. Oh my god. That one needs some serious clean up and work.

Perhaps you could point out the things it needs to be worked on, or even get with Theck and Wrathblood and help them get things right. Saying it's wrong and doing nothing about it, doesn't help the community. A lot of it comes directly from Theck. Yet, you seem to think that his information isn't quite right.

Perhaps you could point out the things it needs to be worked on, or even get with Theck and Wrathblood and help them get things right. Saying it's wrong and doing nothing about it, doesn't help the community. A lot of it comes directly from Theck. Yet, you seem to think that his information isn't quite right.

Sorry if it sounded like I was bashing Theck, did not intend that at all. Don't blame the guy that invented the gun, blame the people using the gun.

The thing is? Can it be done right? I think Theck is doing a great job, especially with his new shift queueing was step into the right direction. It is not Thecks fault, it is just a problem way to complex to compute.

Every single boss fight is unique, the damage in-take a tank takes is different, works in a different way. The problem is not thecks work, it is how people use it.
It is more something that you should know to understand better how your stats work rather than basing your gearing solely on it.

It would be possible to make a mathematical model for tanking stats for 1 specific boss fight, but because no fight is the same, you would have to make one model for each fight in the tier.

So yeah, I am not bashing on Theck, rather how people use his work. Thecks analasis only covers a boss facepounding you with melee hits. That is a very small part of tanking, and looking at it that way seriously deflate and inflate some stats. The older versions did not even include SS and smart SotR usage, so the new version is about as close as he can get to the 'real thing', and we can just see how much his results varied from adding something like that. Can you imagine how much it would vary if you considered the other 30-70% of the damage that tanks take that is not physical melee hit to the face?

And this is exactly my point, you need to understand the stats, how they work. Part of this is reading Thecks work. Then you need to understand the encounters, and how they work. What bosses are you currently working on. You also need to factor in your playstyle and how you play your class. Your healers, your raid. Your current gear. This is why, the correct gearing for someone, is never the same as someone elses.

If someone comes in here asking for help with his gearing, says he just rerolled to his prot paladin for his guild, so his item level is far behind current progress, he is sitting at only 480 itemlevel but they are 12/12 normal and just starting heroic modes. We would probably tell him to gem stamina? As have been seen over and over again in the Help my Tanking thread. As the agreed response on this situations is always stamina. Why is that? Yes, because his gear is far behind the content that he is currently running, that changes his stat weights, how good stats are, insanely inflating stamina.

Now we have another guy, exactly same situation. 12/12 normal and just starting into heroics, now he has been might lucky, he is sitting at 522 ilvl, now not all 522, but some thunderforged and some heroics from the old tier. Though, he feels like his gearing could need some work. Those Parry/Stamina gems in red sockets feel awkward and that riversong enchant he always wondered if it is correct. What we would tell him would probably be to gem for haste or mastery more. But wait, didn't we just tell another guy to gem stamina?

So the question is, can you truly theorycraft a correct answer for a broader audience? I believe every situation is unique, and the answer to tanking is more philosophical than mathematical.

I have been planning for a long time to make a long extensive post covering the stats and their uses in current tier. However IRL and not much time for WoW has caused me not to post this yet. Will see if I get time to do so when I get back home in late May.

@ElitistJerks. I could write him a long list. But some of the stuff is just weird and blatantly wrong information. One thing that really really raised my eyebrows was that in the section about hit/exp that not capping hit/exp would result in a 50/50 chance to miss your HoPo generator. Yeah, no.
First of, it would be a 22.5% chance with CS. Judgment would only have a 7.5% miss chance, and GC procs always give HoPo regardless of hit or miss.
It is those exaggerations that are laid out as 'facts' that I do not really approve on. The linear thinking of the thread in general.
Considering that the thread opening basically says "This is not a guide", makes me question the linear thinking.
It also raises dodge and parry to the skies in that thread. Probably in the light of Thecks recent simulations, where dodge and parry got a high scoring.

Hey, lets take that quick look at Thecks work then. What I feel is, okay, do not want to use the word wrong, since it is great work, but in lack of a better word, what is not 100% correct, in thecks gear set simulations.

The first generation of series.

The lack of Shift queue/sacred shield devalued the other stats more than D/P giving D/P a further edge.
It upvalued expertise hard cap to the skies.
It undervalued haste by a lot.
It undervalued mastery aswell, but not to the same extent as haste, but in comparison to the remainder stats.

The first and second generation of series:

Due to lack of boss special attacks and magic damage.
Dodge and parry is extremely overvalued.
Expertise is extremely overvalued.
Mastery is extremely undervalued.
Haste is slghtly undervalued.

Tank swaps. How the fight is designed. If we are doing very frequent tank swaps on a fight, say I got 10 tank swaps on a fight. That means that each time we tank swap I will be able to have 5 holy power. So lets say that the fight duration is for ease 10 minutes, each tank tank 1 minute. But due to me being able to bank up 5 Holy Power for each tank swap, I am basically gaining 50 HoPo to use during those 5 minutes. which is equal to another 16.66% uptime.
Now this is ofc a specific situations, on some fights it may be less, on some fights it may be more. No fight is the same. But basically, any fight with tank swaps, or periods where you are allowed to bank up holy power freely (i.e. boss stops to melee hit), will have this effect, of having an increased effective uptime on SotR. But lets go back to this example, say you had those 5 tank swaps, that is anothe 16.66% uptime! It is quite obvious that 16.66% additional uptime will have an insane amount of impact on your stats. Mainly mastery will be affected to most by far. Second in line comes haste. Third in line comes hit/exp, and a dead last comes dodge and parry which syncronise very badly with the incresed uptime.

Now there is a lot more to this in other situations etc etc. But I feel like I wrote two A4's now in a post so feels like it is time to stop writing.

Again, props to Theck, but not to the people using his work.

---------- Post added 2013-04-02 at 08:59 AM ----------

Originally Posted by kernelsanderz

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As Celinamuna said. My point was rather that whichever secondary stat route is fine. And that normal modes are tuned so low that you could do it with whichever stat (insert spirit as a joke). Basically the point was that if you are having issues in normal modes, it is most likely your playstyle / your raid group and not you gearing, as those things have a far bigger impact on you. Gearing becomes more important into heroic modes.

Ofc gearing properly in normal modes is a should (must) do. Was just pointing out that the choice between haste/mastery/stamina have a lower impact until later content.

Last edited by Firefly33; 2013-04-02 at 09:12 AM.

Volun-told - A supposedly optional event, award, assignment, or activity in which a person (or persons) are required to attend either by persons-in-charge nominating them or their peers expecting them to be there. The individual often has no say in the matter, and non-attendance in frowned upon.I am so tired of seeing terrible people, being admired, for being terrible people.